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An anonymous reader writes "French researchers have demonstrated a robot that controls its own arm as well as a person's arm to manipulate objects in a collaborative manner, IEEE reports. Electrodes attached to the person's arm allow the robot to make the elbow and hand move to perform tasks. The tasks are currently simple (dropping a ball through a hoop, as shown in one of their videos), but the researchers say more complex ones are possible. They also say the approach has therapeutic benefits and their goal is to 'develop robotic technologies that can help people suffering from paralysis and other disabilities to regain some of their motor skills.'"

Considering what happened during the French Revolution, the current Powers-That-Be has good reason to fear the French people. They stormed the Bastille once, and celebrate it every year just to remind the government that they aren't afraid to do it again.

That, and the French people weren't afraid to invent and use the guillotine.

there is one repetitive motion that I must do with my hand once in a while that I may wish was done without my direct participation. On the other hand... what if the software fails and the hand goes all the way over my head?

Oh yeah, that can't possibly go wrong. Nope, can't think how that might be a mistake.

Still, if the idea of a robot commandeering your limbs sounds a bit, uh, scary, you're not alone. The audience at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), where the researchers presented their results in September, let out a nervous gasp upon seeing the video of the experiment:

Sorry, but this is just a yawn, now when they used a computer to make a paralyzed person walk, now that was news. I think that was over a decade ago, but I'm being too lazy this morning to look it up. These guys on the other hand aren't doing anything new, unless you consider adding in a toy robot to play wastebin basketball some kind of advancement.

This appears to require a person with an arm that works; unless I misunderstand the electrodes are stimulating a developed (i.e. non-atrophied) arm with working nervous system. I would be curious to see this trick work on a limb that was truly disabled.....

I wonder if it's possible to get this system to do your workout for you. Like, you program it to do a hundred bench presses and then lift weights for an hour. All the while you could, I dunno, watch TV on LCD goggles or something. Or, even better - suppose you could get this system to work on your arm muscles while you play video games using one of those brain-control interfaces. I would love to have a system like this.

You know your muscles are still going to hurt just as much as if you were making them move by yourself, right? Unless you sever the nerve connections, which given your attitude, I can't entirely rule out.

You know your muscles are still going to hurt just as much as if you were making them move by yourself, right? Unless you sever the nerve connections, which given your attitude, I can't entirely rule out.

With the right feedback sensors in place, the system could perform the exercises with greater precision/effectiveness than you could do while distracted (say, watching TV) so it could prove to be a benefit to those that want to exercise but would prefer not to have to concern themselves with the intricate details of what the most effective routine is.

I can see this being EXTREMELY useful for emergency situations that involve inattention or sleep. Say you're on a shuttle to Mars, sleeping away. Suddenly, there's a hull breach! You have seconds to get into your pressure suit before you pass out and die. You might burn half your time just on hearing the alarm, waking up, processing what's going on, and fumbling towards the suit locker.

If you're wearing your Robo Attachments, it can detect the alarm, and immediately start moving you towards the suit loc

Someday soon we may not have any quadras and paras nor amputees which will be wonderful. But when it becomes commonplace - as silly and trivial as it sounds - competitve sports at nearly every level may become impossible as the augments become faster, stronger, and more accurate than the naturals.

Someday this research will be invaluable in restoring mobility to robots that have suffered serious damage or manufacturing defect, enabling their broken limbs to be replaced by (admittedly inferior) limbs harvested from humans.

It would also seem like you could have a Dr working in an VR setup relaying his arm/hand control data to a remote human robot. That would allow for a neurosurgeon in NY to have a untrained remote "hand droid" in Antarctica, orbit or the moon do the surgery. It keeps the number of human onsite low.